Your attention, please. The Blu-ray now arriving on this platform is the Studio Canal Cult Classics release of Linie 1, Reinhard Hauff’s 1988 big-screen adaptation of Germany’s second-most successful musical after Brecht’s Threepenny Opera. Linie 1 tells the story of Sunnie (Inka Victoria Goetschel), a young woman who, having learnt […]
Studio Canal
The Final Programme (1973) 1970s Psychedelic Cult Classic Still Holds Up (Review)
The Queen of Spades (1949) Faustian Vintage Supernatural horror with a Kick! (Review)
The Driver (1978) Walter Hill’s influential, minimalist crime classic (Blu-Ray Review)
Even though it’s only Walter Hill’s second feature, The Driver feels like it was made by someone with decades of experience. Hill takes tropes from old-school Westerns and Noirs and strips them back to their most primitive forms, although it retains a revisionist approach to the genres where no character […]
Extreme Prejudice (1987) Jack of all Genres, Master of Some? (Blu-ray Review)
The 1980s can be defined by many elements. Big hair and shoulder pads, bright colours, rampant consumerism. Cinematically, the decade saw the development of a particular type of action movie, a sub-genre that reconstituted American masculinity severely wounded by the Vietnam War with Reaganite assertion and nationalism. Indeed, the presidency […]
High Crime (1973) The Case of the Classic Poliziotteschi and its Cut Ending (Review)
Throughout the 60s and 70s American cinema underwent a tonal shift; gone were the days of the sweet sentimentalism of directors like Frank Capra and here was the growing cynicism from people like William Friedkin and Don Siegel. The latter two directors released two highly influential films in the world […]
Kill Them All and Come Back Alone (1968): The Dirty Half-Dozen of the Spaghetti Western (Review)
Released to Blu-ray on Studio Canal’s Cult Classics label comes a rip-roaring Spaghetti Western from 1968, Enzo G. Castellari’s wonderfully titled Kill Them All and Come Back Alone starring Chuck Connors, the rangy former basketball and baseball player and star of popular Western TV serials The Rifleman and Branded and […]
The Frightened City (1961) Connery on the Cusp (Review)
Released to StudioCanal’s Vintage Classics Collection this week, The Frightened City is a 1961 British noir from Canadian-born director John Lemont about protection rackets in London’s West End. It’s a solid, if fairly unremarkable gangland thriller, one which would perhaps be lost to the mists of time were it not […]
Saint Maud (2019) the incredible morphing empathy of psychological seaside horror (Review)
The Fifth Element (1997) – The most enjoyable Sci-Fi of the 1990s (Review)
Perhaps the biggest strength director Luc Besson has in his arsenal is his ability to construct an immediately endearing fantasy world. He does so with The Fifth Element, a sci-fi drama with sprinklings of comedy and whimsical light-heartedness, wrapped around a host of action set pieces, effective set and costume design, […]